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Area
Public Educational Media
Date
April 7, 2021
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With major funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, PRX launched the podcast series TRAX in 2020, designed specifically for children ages 9-13 and their families. On March 18, 2021, TRAX launched the first season of The Genius Generation, a weekly podcast that will dive deeply into one incredible, meaningful invention, scientific discovery, or entrepreneurial pursuit–and the young person behind it. The goal of this science podcast series is to inspire tweens to pursue their own scientific inquiries, create their own inventions, or start their own businesses.

The current season of will include 23 episodes, each 10-15 minutes long. Through these conversations, TRAX’s growing audience of tweens will learn what inspires these remarkable young people to explore, create, and build, and to hear how their creative inventions and discoveries are having a meaningful impact on their own communities and beyond.​ The podcast is hosted by Danni Washington, an energetic young science communicator and the first African American woman to host her own science television series. The Genius Generation will appear on platforms where audiences typically access podcasts, such as Apple/iTunes, Spotify, Pandora, NPR One, Stitcher, Google Podcasts, Amazon Music and more.

According to Emily Feld, producer of The Genius Generation, the young people they have featured on the podcast “have gone out of their way to make the world a better place and have used the tools they have learned in school to do major things.” For example, the first episode profiled Ananya Sridhar, who at age 12 heard about the water crisis in Flint, Michigan, and was inspired to invent an affordable way to test for lead contamination in water.

Upcoming episodes include the following:

  • Anisha Musti, a 15 year-old quantum computing scientist and CEO who developed an algorithm to identify whether a patient has Parkinson’s disease based on their speech.
  • Chander Payne, a 17 year-old who created the urban beet, and has become a regenerative farming expert.
  • Anna Du, a middle school student who invented a robot that can detect microplastics in the ocean.
  • Avi Schiffman, an 18-year old who created the coronavirus tracking website in January 2020.
  • Hannah Lucas, an 18 year-old who created the app Not OK, which alerts family members when someone they love is having a mental crisis and needs help.
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